Saturday, October 6, 2012

Pinning for Real: Game Pieces, Art, and More

This week, Pinterest was full of ideas for the classroom.  For the past few months, we have been Pinning for Real on an analog Pinterest board in our teacher workroom.  The exciting thing is that I have actually walked in and seen teachers looking at the pics and scanning the QR codes that take them to related blog posts!!!  Disclaimer: While I teach high school math, I work on a 7-12 campus; the ideas hit a variety of grade levels and subjects:), but can definitely be used as a springboard for activities in any classroom. In college one of my professors would bring in a common household items and ask us how we could use it.  The lists were lengthy and the idea was to get us to think beyond the obvious (a toothbrush to prop open the heavy wooden window).  That is how I looked at this week's pins.  When I saw the random ideas, I asked, "So, how can I use this in math?"
Making this week's board and my thoughts for math:
ABC's of Crazy's Game pieces made from students’ pictures. (This would be fun to make for family fun night too.)  How could I use this in the math classroom?  How about as game pieces for @Nutterbutter Smith's Games for Students by Students or my own students' board games for review.
aly mw's Onomatopoeia Art  
I love the bright colors and the sense of fun that these pieces seem to evoke.  My sweet friend, Kathleen, who teaches American History is having students create a graffiti wall inspired by the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance which reminds me of these colorful masterpieces.  Art in Math?  I love having Geometry students create art using specific shapes, angles and line lengths (I have had students create "stain glass windows" that contain required elements).  I also like Coordinate Grid pics like Math Aid's Pink Panther.  Maybe this year, I could have students create their own pics using piecewise functions for their friends to solve. (Future #Made4Math???)
School of Fisher's How-to for Printing on Sticky Notes Ummm...printing on sticky notes?  Any subject!  Anytime!  Most obvious, exit tickets:)
Westover's Librarian, Katherine's idea for "What's your status?" Could be used for fictional characters, historical figures, and science elements.  For math?  Famous mathematicians would be the easiest, but I also thought about assigning the students a type of function like linear or quadratic and have them post from that point of view.  If I took this route, it seems like a student would truly have to understand about the domain, range and graph to complete this extension activity.  Perhaps, it could be more of a riddle in which students have a function and they could write descriptive "clues" until classmates guess their equation...????...just thinking out loud...but, I am always looking for meaningful ways to keep my fab 4 (early finishers) working from bell to bell.

Want to create your own analog board?  This week's finds ready to print:


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